Tattoo: my first tattoo

I finally decided to get a tattoo. I had something in my mind, and looking online, I found a few designs I liked, and finally I decided upon one. My advice to anyone who wants to have a tattoo is to look thoroughly, to be certain that they want that specific tattoo. Do not rush into the decision. As for me, I am really excited about the result with my tattoo.


Choose a good tattoo artist. It seems like I chose a great one, and so the result is much better than I ever expected.

The two photos are of my new tattoo.

Death and the Maiden

Today I learned that the father of a good friend of mine died of a heart attack. I am reminded of what I went through a few years ago, and that, no matter what, the death of a loved one leaves behind a huge black hole. A black hole that can never be filled, no matter what.

In 2204 I lost my grandfather to Alzheimer's. In 2005 my father died of cancer. In 2006 I lost my grandmother of natural causes, she was around 100 years of age. In 2007 my little sister died in a car crash.

The pain from these deaths, and especially my little sister's who would be 31 today, can never go away. It mellows with time, it might not be as sharp and as strong as in the first few months, but it still is there. There have been times when I saw someone on the street that looks like my sister or my father; but then as they come closer, reality hits me again. It's not them. It's someone else.

When my friend called, I did not know what to tell him. I just told him that I am sorry, I offered my condolences. I was devastated. I called him a bit later again, to tell him that if he needs anything, even just to talk, to call me. I understand what he is going through, I went through the same pain and the same anguish myself.

I know that I am not going to see my loved ones ever again. They are dead. They are ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I don't believe in afterlife or anything similar.

One of the worst things that someone told me when my little sister died was that god wanted her as an angel and took her. It was on the phone, and really I wanted to smash the head of that idiot. That is supposed to be comforting? On the contrary, it made me angry. There is no god, there are no angels, there is no afterlife. All we have is this one fucking life and we better live it to the fullest.

I am the Maiden. And Death is around us all the time.

Greece... and its situation.

I usually do not talk or write about politics, or economics, for the very simple reason that I hate politics and I get bored by economics. But I need to set the record straight here, as someone who was born and raised in Athens Greece. As someone who made the huge mistake of not staying in the UK when she had the chance but because my family were whining, literally, returned to Greece.

The situation in Greece is not new. It is not something that people in Greece just woke up to. It has been a very long time that the honest and hard working people of the private sector in Greece have been and still are held  hostage by corrupt politicians, the public sector and the Orthodox Church of Greece S.A.

The private sector is the one that is ONCE AGAIN being fucked over because of corruption in the government, because of the public sector. There are good companies that got fucked over and have closed, and people are losing their jobs. My own company is standing for the moment, but as we deal in construction, I may be without work and without any prospects in Greece by the end of the year if things don't calm down. I have paid my taxes, and paid whatever the law has told me, and have not tried to steal or to pay less or anything. And a lot of people are in the same boat with me.

Politicians lie. And everyone knows that greek politicians are the pit. I do not know who has voted for those idiots, but certainly it was not me. Politicians in Greece are interested only in their pockets and getting re-elected. So, what they did is put a lot of people unlawfully to work in the public sector, without any skills a lot of times.

Politicians have not had any cuts in their salaries at all. Oh, no not the Greek politicians. And every politician says that we are against the new austerity measures, but none of them has even said anything about cutting their own salaries. Not even the head of the communist party, has said anything of that sort. 

The private sector in Greece has been shouting for years about the public sector and the problems of putting too many people in there, people who have no skills and no knowledge and about all the problems we have had. I have more than once sent various letters of complaint to various public services because my rights as an individual and the rights of my company were violated, but never got a real answer.

The public sector employees' in Greece are the lucky ones. They cannot get fired; they do not have to worry where their next paycheck will come from or if it will come. And they are the ones making the most fuss. They had extras paid to them in order to :
1. Get to their work on time; no I am not joking!
2. To take documents from one floor of the building to another... Again I am not kidding.
3. In one organization, the 8th hour of work was considered overtime! Oh yes, they had 35 hour week work, and the extra 5 hours were overtime. And I am talking about people in offices!


Next, the Church of Greece. We have no separation of church/religion and state; I, an atheist, am forced to pay the salaries of the greek orthodox christian priests from my taxes, and so do all sorts of other people like buddhists, muslims, etc. etc. And the church of Greece is fucking rich beyond comprehension and there are idiots out there who leave their money and property to the greek orthodox church. It has been estimated that the annual tax evasion of the Orthodox Church of Greece SA is about 4 billion euros, and if we add the priests' salaries, etc. then add another half a billion euros. Oh, yes, the biggest fraud of them all is the Orthodox Church of Greece SA. It makes the greek population pay its employees' salaries, it does not pay taxes on anything, and it always asks for more money from the general populace. The Orthodox Church of Greece SA is nothing more than a black economic hole sucking money out of everyone of us. 

If you want to fuck over the people of Greece, and especially the private sector, then chuck Greece out of the euro. Inflation, and poverty and unemployment will soar and Greece will not be able to survive, and people will die on the streets. And this is not a fantasy scenario. There are right now children passing out in schools from hunger, because their parents are unemployed, and the unemployment benefits all go to pay for the house mortgage.

Yes, the honest and hard working people of Greece are being held hostage. We are being held hostage by corrupt politicians, by the public sector and by the Orthodox Church of Greece. We need new politicians. We need a new type of government and a new public sector. 

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips

This is an image that I just found on facebook. And it needs to be advertised, shared, blogged, and people made aware of this.

Kraken - China Mieville

China Mieville has some quite wonderfully weird ideas for his books. And Kraken is not an exception. The whole book is based on the idea of the apocalypse; an apocalypse that is set in motion when a specimen of giant squid, kraken, is stolen from a museum, and its curator, Billy Harrow, is catapulted in a London he never knew existed.

I will start by saying that I love the way Mieville writes his books. He has an excellent command of the English language, in my opinion. And this is shown in some parts of this book, where, while his sentences are syntactically correct, those phrases do not make sense but make sense in the context of the book. Even if I tried to explain this with an excerpt, unless you have read the book, it is difficult to see.

China Mieville is one of the writers of the so-called "New Weird". In this book he literally catapults the reader into a never-seen London, called Heresiopolis, because of the various cults that live there, because of the magic and magic knacks, because of the creatures, like familiars that live there. A London, unnoticed by most people, a London, that "normal" people do not even know exists; but a very real, weird, different, and inhabited by all sorts of people and creatures, London. All sorts of cults and churches live in this London, in Heresiopolis. Cults that worship animal gods or unseen gods; cults as diverse as Cthulhu cults and Krakenists, or Chaos Nazis, and various Christian sects.

But also individuals live in Heresiopolis. Some that are evil, like Goss and Subby, or some that say they are neutral, like the Londonmancers. Some that have criminal empires like the Tattoo...

Goss and fucking Subby! What a pair of wonderfully weird and evil characters. Those two are probably one of the highlights of the book. I was not as impressed with Dane or the Londonmancers as I was with Billy Harrow and Goss and fucking Subby! Collingswood and the FSRC did not feature as much as I would like to, but I don't think there was room for stories from the FSRC. Maybe Mieville will write a few short stories about them in the future.

And I have to mention Wati and his union of familiars. Wati is one of the most likeable characters of the book, and the idea of a union of familiars is one of those weirdly humourous ideas that Mieville has. The picketing by cats and dogs, the birds doing picket lines in the sky, and all the familiars on strike was really entertaining in the book, and it was beautifully made into a part of the story.

I loved the whole story and its progression, and how it all went down, up until the end. The ending was not what I expected, and it was a bit anticlimatic, after Billy Harrow goes back to the Darwin Centre, and confronts Vardy. That part was the one that I thought was anti-climatic. Or maybe it's because I dislike creationists, and what they stand for.

All in all, this is a book I immensely enjoyed, and would recommend.

Io's shadow on Jupiter

Beautiful isn't it? This is an image taken by the Hubble Telescope. A telescope that has given us a lot of discoveries, a lot of new information on our solar system, on our galaxy, on the universe in which we live.

Jupiter is the biggest planet of our solar system. It is a gas giant; this means that Jupiter does not have a surface as such; its composition is mostly hydrogen and helium.

The image at the left shows the shadow of Io, one of Jupiter's many moons, as it is cast over on the upper atmosphere of the planet. Io is one of the most volcanically active bodies of our solar system.

For more beautiful photos and more information, you can go to the Hubble Site itself: HubbleSite by NASA.

Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows

Let's get something clear on this one: I have not seen the first movie. But these are standalone stories and so, even if someone has not watched the first installment, they can watch the second movie without any continuity problems.

I went to see it yesterday, and I must say I was not impressed. Not at all. A nice movie for a couple of hours, but other than that, this is not Sherlock Holmes at all. This is a very very different character from the one portrayed in the A. C. Doyle books, and to my mind totally unrecognizable.

If there are good qualities in this movie, they are its humour and Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes. Yes, this is a general action adventure movie, with the right dose of humour. But, I will repeat this again, it is not Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock was never flamboyant, neither did he flirt nor did he fight like a ninja; his quality and his strength was in his mind. For those who have read the books and/or  have seen the old BBC series with Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, or the excellent new series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch, again from the BBC, will understand what I mean.

I must say one thing though: I loved Stephen Fry in this. He was brilliant and funny as ever, and he portrayed his own version of Mycroft Holmes. I cannot say enough about the brilliance of Stephen Fry. It is always a joy seeing him in a movie, or a documentary, or something.

I knew that I was not going to like it very much; after having seen the new BBC series Sherlock, having read a few of the stories, and remembering Jeremy Brett in the role, this was not what I had in mind for a Sherlock Holmes movie.

Humour and Stephen Fry apart, there was nothing else of interest in the movie. The story was one of thousand others that could make it into a general action/adventure film, and definitely as far away from Doyle's style as it could be. This is a totally americanized ninja action super-hero version of Sherlock Holmes, and it does not look good.


In essence, this is not a movie to spend money on it. If you can watch it for free, on TV or from a friend, then do so, you will have a couple of hours of fun. But going to the movie theatre? Definitely not. Fortunately I had half-price tickets for it, so it was not a total loss.

BBC's A Night with The Stars

I just finished watching this BBC lecture/documentary. I must say that I am a fan of Professor Brian Cox. Both because I have read some of his popular science books and because I have seen some of the documentaries he has done for the BBC.

This lecture had exactly what is needed to popularize physics and to make people understand some of the laws and principles of physics. It was simple to understand, without any big words or convoluted sentences. It was delivered with humour and famous guests, like Simon Pegg. As a wanna-be physicist, and as someone who is deemed weird and eccentric at times, exactly for my love of mathematics and physics, this is the kind of documentary we need. People need to see that physics, and generally science, is not as strange or away from reality as some people think.

Plus there was Brian Cox delivering that lecture, who is always a delight to watch. He is passionate about physics, he knows how to present the material, he has humour. I will say it again: I am a big fan. Science needs more people like him, to educate more people about concepts that are central to everything! From our technology to our bodies, everything is physics.

I leave you with the Youtube videos of the BBC documentary.

Of reading and books.

I love books. I love to read. I love to study. I feel naked without a book in my bag. Sometimes, I may carry a magazine I am interested in, or my e-book reader; waiting to get the iPad, so I can carry a lot of books on pdf, or on the Kindle application for the iPad.

When I read, I get transported into new worlds, I get emotionally attached to the characters of the books, especially if they are good and interesting characters. When I read, I concentrate so much in the book and what I am reading, that I get startled even by the bell or the ringing of my phone.

Each book has its own life and story; from the writer's perspective to the stories of the characters, to our own perspective of the book, each book teaches something. Even the books we deem as bad or unreadable, they teach us something, even if it is to avoid this genre or this writer.

Sometimes I cannot concentrate enough to read. Sometimes, I am not in the mood for reading. But even in those times, I need to have at least a book close to me. Because my mood or concentration may change at any moment, and when it does, I want to have my reading material handy.


I have an e-book reader and I am also getting an iPad 2, in order to be able to read some downloaded pdfs, or other material, without resorting to printing. Or because the downloadable versions are much cheaper than the paper versions. However, the feel and smell of an actual paper book is unique. I love that smell, I love the feel of the paper on my hands, turning the pages...

As someone I value says, Giannis Servetas of Radio Arvyla fame, books are your best friend. They can be in your bookcases for a long time, and you will never hear a peep from them. The books will wait patiently for you to open and read them, they will be there and never leave your side. Unless of course, you have friends that are bookworms like you... 

1 bn euros on... water and sugar pills!

Homeopathy: the belief that water has memory and remembers the "active" ingredients, and that the more diluted a drug is in water, the more potent it becomes.

I am not joking. That is one of the tenets of homeopathy. And I am asking. If water remembers, then why doesn't it remember the shit and the radioactive elements that are thrown all over the world? Or the CO2 or anything else that we all throw in the water?

And believers in homeopathy, or should I say a kind of magic, go and spend their money on water and sugar pills. And all they get is the placebo effect.

There have been more than 100 clinical trials on homeopathic drugs. And none of the drugs showed that they have any actual real effect. All they showed is that whether you take it or not, the result is the same. Only when people believe that it works, they improve somewhat, but it's the same percentage as the placebo effect.

1 billion euros is spent every year on homeopathy. 1 billion euros is the market for homeopathic drugs and homeopaths. And this is only in the European Union. How many billions is the homeopathic and alternative medicine market worth worldwide? And then they have labelled the pharmaceutical companies as "Big Pharma". And we skeptics have named the alternative medicine crowd "Big Placebo".

The difference being that first of all, actual pharmaceutical drugs get in the market after research and extensive clinical trials. It has been shown to work. It has been shown that it is safe and that whatever side-effects it may have, have no lasting effects on the body. Or if they have, the benefits of the drug are much more important than the side-effects.

But with homeopathic drugs or should I say water and sugar pills, there are no trials, no approvals from Drug Administrations, nothing. And we get to results like the ones for Zicam, a nasal spray labelled "homeopathic". However, it was dangerous for people's health as many people lost their sense of smell after using this drug: Zicam

How much money has to be wasted on methods that do not work, and that are proven to have risks for people's health? Homeopaths, and generally the "Big Placebo" crowd, reject proven medical treatments, in order to sell water and sugar pills, and methods that have no effect.

How much money has to be wasted on useless sugar pills? Instead of spending it for actual medical research on cancer, on AIDS, on stem cell research? Actual researchers around the world, people who are trying to improve our lives and increase our knowledge are starving for research money. And the gullible give it for unproven, untested treatments, for quackery such as homeopathy. 

About 2-3 years ago, I was enrolled in MSXR209  Mathematical Modelling, a mathematical physics course with the Open University. One of my fellow students was a homeopath, and we got into arguing about homeopathy. I asked him about clinical trials and scientific papers that show homeopathy to be effective. He told me that he would send me the relevant articles, and data via e-mail. Needless to say, I am still waiting...

Homeopathy is equal to quackery. If anyone reads this blog, please do some actual research on homeopathy and alternative treatments, and see for yourself. All they have is anecdotal evidence, and the placebo effect.

A couple of books I recommend on the subject are:

Trick or Treatment - Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre